In the discussion thus far we have restricted ourselves to that portion of the popUlation, embracing as we have seen some two-thirds to three-fourths ofthe total, which appears readily to conform to the dispossessed condition of a proletariat. But the system of monopoly capitalism has brought into being a further mass of employment, not inconsiderable in size, that does not answer so readily to such a definition. Like the petty bourgeoisie of pre-monopoly capitalism (the petty proprietors in farming, trade, services, the professions, and artisan occupations), it does not fit easily into the polar conception of economy and society. But unlike that earlier middle-class mass, which has so largely evaporated, it corresponds increasingly to the formal definition of a working class. That is, like the working class it possesses no economic or occupational independence, is employed by capital and its offshoots, possesses no access to the labor process or the means ofproduction outside that employ
ment, and must renew its labors for capital incessantly in order to subsist. This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and "professional" employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth. Relatively, it is nowhere near so large as the old petty bourgeoisie which, on the basis ofindependent entrepreneurship, occupied as much as half or more ofthe population in the pre-monopoly stage ofcapitalism. It embraces in the United States today perhaps over 15 but less than 20 percent of total employment. Its rapid growth as a partial replacement for the old middle class, however, makes its definition a matter of special interest, all the more so since its purely formal character is similar to that of the clearly proletarianized working-class population.
The complexities of the class structure ofpre-monopoly capitalism arose from the fact that so large a proportion ofthe working population, being neither employed by capital nor itself employing labor to any significant extent, fell outside the capital-labor polarity. The complexity of the class structure of modem monopoly capitalism arises from the very opposite consideration:
namely, that almost all ofthe population has been transformed into employees ofcapital. Almost every working association with the modem corporation, or
279
280 Labor and Monopoly Capital The "Middle Layers" ofEmployment 281 with its imitative offshoots in governmental or so-called nonprofit organiza
tions, is given the form of the purchase and sale of labor power.
The purchase and sale of labor power is the classic form for the creation and continued existence of the working class. Insofar as the working class is concerned, this form embodies social relations of production, the relations of subordination to authority and exploitation. We must now consider the possi
bility of the same form being made to conceal, embody, and express other relations of production. To take a most extreme example, the fact that the operating executives of a giant corporation are employed by that corporation, and in that capacity do not own its plants and bank accounts, is merely the form given to capitalist rule in modem society. These operating executives, by virtue oftheir high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act
"professionally" for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personi
fies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute ofbeing part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. The form ofhired employment gives expression to two totally different realities: in one case, capital hires a "labor force" whose duty it is to work, under external direction, to increase capital; in the other, by a process of selection within the capitalist class and chiefly from its own ranks, capital chooses a management staff to represent it on the spot, and in representing it to supervise and organize the labors of the working population.
Thus far the difference is clear, but between these two extremes there is a range ofintermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees. The gradations of position in the line of management may be seen chiefly in terms of authority, while gradations in staff positions are indicated by the levels of technical expertise. Since the authority and expertise ofthe middle ranks in the capitalist corporation represent an unavoidable delegation of responsibility, the position of such functionaries may best be judged by their relation to the power and wealth that commands them from above, and to the mass oflabor beneath them which they in tum help to control, command, and organize. Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders ofthe corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money--a commodity exchange--but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a "management stake," even if a small one. The
same is true insofar as they share in a recognized guarantee of employment, in
uunuuu;:lS UIIlCIlHcr I,;UPIlUl1lSl Hur wurKer; It pluyeu IlU UlfCl,;l rUIC HI UIC I,;U~llW
accumulation process, whether on one side or the other. -thIS "new mIddle
~diate position not because it is outside - 'ecause, as part of this process, it takes t only does it receive its pettY share in
J I
282 Labor and Monopoly Capital
the prerogatives and rewards of capital, but it also bears the mark of the proletarian condition. For these employees the social form taken by their work, their true place in the relations of production, their fundamental condition of subordination as so much hired labor, increasingly makes itself felt, especially in the mass occupations that are part of this stratum. We may cite here particularly the mass employments of draftsmen and technicians, engineers and accountants, nurses and teachers, and the multiplying ranks of supervisors, foremen, and petty managers. First, these become part of a mass labor market that assumes the characteristics of all labor markets, including the necessary existence of a reserve army of unemployed exercising a downward pressure on pay levels. *And second, capital, as soon as it disposes of a mass of labor in any specialty--a mass adequate in size to repay the application of its principles of the technical division of labor and hierarchical control over execution by means of a fiml grasp on the links of conceptiou----subjects that specialty to some of the forms of "rationalization" characteristic of the capi
talist mode of production.
In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness ofthese employees. Feeling the insecu
rities of their role as sellers oflabor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms ofdissociation which are popularly called
"alienation" and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.
In the chapter devoted to clerical labor, we have already described the manner in which an intermediate stratum was enlarged into a mass of work
ing-class employment, and in the process divested of all its privileges and intermediate characteristics. It is not necessary to anticipate here a similar evolution ofthe specialized and lower-managerial employees in any near-term future. But it should be recognized that the difficulties experienced by those who, in the period before World War I, attempted to arrive at a "definition" of the class position of clerical employees are somewhat the same as the difficul
ties one must today confront in defining the intermediate strata of modern employment. These difficulties arise, in the last analysis, from the fact that classes, the class structure, the social structure as a whole, are not fixed entities but rather ongoing processes, rich in change, transition, variation, and
*The first major instance of this came with the Depression of the 1930s, but in the rapid surge of capital accumulation and the transformation of industry that began with the Second World War this tendency was overcome. By the end of the 1960s, however, rising rates of unemployment among ''professionals'' of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to "associate themselves" with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.
The ''Middle Layers" ojEmployment 283 incapable ofbeing encapsulated in formulas, no matter how analytically proper such formulas may be. * The analysis ofthis process requires an understanding of the internal relations and connections which serve as its motive power, so that its direction as a process may be understood. Only secondarily does the problem arise of "defining" the place ofparticular elements in the process, and this problem cannot always be solved neatly and definitively, nor, it should be added, does science require that it must be so solved.
Notes
L E. P. Thompson, TheMakingojtheEnglish Working Class (New York, 1964), pp. 10-1 L
*E. P. Thompson writes: "There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not Marx's meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day 'Marxist' writing. 'It,' the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematicalIy--so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of prodUction....
"If we remember that class is a relationship, and not a thing, we cannot think in this way."]
Chapter 19
Productive and Unproductive Labor
In an earlier chapter devoted to the labor which produces services, we arrived at the conclusion that the existence of a working class as such does not depend upon the various concrete forms of labor which it is called upon to exercise, but rather its social form. Labor which is put to work in the production ofgoods is not thereby sharply divided from labor applied to the production of services, since both are forms of production of commodities, and of production on aã
capitalist basis, the object of which is the production not only of value-in-ex
change but of surplus value for the capitalist. The variety ofdeterminate forms oflabor may affect the consciousness, cohesiveness, or economic and political activity ofthe working class, but they do not affect its existence as a class. The various forms onabor which produce commodities for the capitalist are all to be counted as productive labor. The worker who builds an office building and the worker who cleans it every night alike produce value and surplus value.
Because they are productive for the capitalist, the capitalist allows them to work and produce; insofar as such workers alone are productive, society lives at their expense.
The question then arises: What of those whose labor is unproductive? If, as Marx said, the difference between the Roman proletariat and the modem proletariat is that while the former lived at the expense of society, the latter supports society upon its shoulders, are unproductive workers to be omitted from the modem proletariat? To answer this question we must first gain a clear idea of the various kinds of unproductive labor that exist in capitalist society and their historical development.
The terms "productive" and "unproductive" labor derive from the exten
sive discussion which took place among the classical economists, and which Marx analyzed so thoroughly in the first part of his Theories ofSurplus- Mllue, the uncompleted work that was drafted as a fourth volume of Capital. In order to understand the terminology it is necessary to grasp first of all that the discussion ofproductive and unproductive labor, as it was conducted by Marx, implied no judgment about the nature ofthe work processes under discussion or their usefulness to humans in particular or society at large, but was con
cerned specifically and entirely with the role onabor in the capitalist mode of production. Thus the discussion is in reality an analysis of the relations of
284
Productive and Unproductive Labor 285 production and, ultimately, of the class structure of society, rather than of the utility of particular varieties of labor.
Essentially, Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. This excludes all labor which is not exchanged against capital. Self-employed proprietors--farmers, artisans, handicraftsman, tradesmen, professionals, all other self-employed----are according to this definition not productive workers because their labor is not exchanged for capital and does not directly contribute to the increase ofcapital.*Nor is the servant a productive worker, even though employed by the capitalist, because the labor of the servant is exchanged not against capital but against revenue. The capitalist who hires servants is not making profits, but spending them. It is clear that this definition has nothing to do with the utility ofthe labor employed, or even its concrete form. The very same labor may be either productive or unproductive, depending upon its social form. To hire the neighbor'S boy to cut the lawn is to set in motion unproductive labor; to call a gardening firm which sends out a boy to do the job (perhaps even the same boy) is another thing entirely. Or, to put the matter from the point of view of the capitalist, to hire gardening labor to maintain his family'S lawn is unproductive consumption, while to hire the very same gardening labor in order to realize a profit from its work is to set in motion productive labor for the purpose of accumulating capital.
A moment's reflection will show the importance ofthis distinction for the evolution of capitalist society during the past two hundred years. The change in the social form of labor from that which is, from the capitalist standpoint, unproductive to that which is productive, means the transformation from self-employment to capitalist employment, from simple commodity produc~
tion to capitalist commodity production, from relations between persons to relations between things, from a society of scattered producers to a society of corporate capitalism. Thus the distinction between productive and unproduc
tive labor, which disregards its concrete fonn in order to analyze it as a social form, far from being a useless abstraction, represents a decisive point in the analysis of capitalism, and shows us once more how social forms dominate and transform the significance of material things and processes.
The tailor who makes a suit on order for a customer creates a useful object in the form of a commodity; he exchanges it for money and out of this pays his own expenses and means of subsistence; the customer who hires this done purchases a useful object and expects nothing for the money other than the suit. But the capitalist who hires a roomful of tailors to make suits brings into
* Even more, they jail outside of the distinction between prodUctive and unpro
ductive labor, because they are outside the capitalist mode ofproduction. See the clear and comprehensive presentation of Marx's theory ofproductive and unproductive labor by Ian Gough.1
286 Labor and Monopoly Capital
being a social relation. In this relation, the tailors now create far more than suits; they create themselves as productive workers and their employer as capitalist. Capital is thus not just money exchanged for labor; it is money exchanged for labor with the purpose of appropriating that value which it creates over and above what is paid, the surplus value. In each case where money is exchanged for labor with this purpose it creates a social relation, and as this relation is generalized throughout the productive processes it creates social classes. Therefore, the transfonnation of unproductive labor into labor which is, for the capitalist's purpose of extracting surplus value, productive, is the very process of the creation of capitalist society.
Classical political economy, both Ricardian and Marxian, confronted a world in which the largest part oflabor could still be reckoned as unproductive (according to the above definitions) because it did not contribute directly to the increase of capital. Much ofthe history of the capitalist nations during the past two centuries is the account of the destruction ofthese fonns oflabor, so that from a dominant share of social labor these fonns have been reduced to an insignificant share. This is another way of saying what was pointed out earlier: that the capitalist mode of production has subordinated to itself all fonns of work, and all labor processes now pass through the sieve of capital, leaving behind their tribute of surplus.
However, all labor that enters into the capital accumulation process and is necessary for it is not thereby rendered productive. For it is also true that productive labor which serves as the foundation of capitalist society is labor which produces commodity value. just as capitalism, as a system, cannot escape from the productive processes upon which society is based, no matter how remote from production its upper reaches may become, so commodity value is the ultimate foundation upon which all fonns ofvalue--money, credit instruments, insurance policies, shares, etc., etc.--depend. For the capitalist who is in the business of producing commodity values, the aim is always to capture as great a margin over his costs as possible. But in order to do this, he must realize the commodity values, transforming them into money fonn. Thus even for the industrial capitalist, who is producing in order to sell, commercial functions arise within the finn. For the commercial capitalist, who, apart from the functions of distribution, storage, packaging, transportation, display, etc., simply buys in order to sell, this realization problem constitutes the essence of his business altogether.
With the routinization of the processes of producing value and surplus value, the attention of the capitalist is increasingly centered upon this realiza
tion problem, the solution of which becomes even more important than the creation of value. At the same time, as the surpluses created in production become ever more immense, the use of capital simply for purposes of credit, speculation, etc., increases enonnously. In this latter case, what is involved is
Productive and Unproductive Labor 287 the appropriation of portions of the surplus commodity value which arises in production. These two functions, the realization and the appropriation by capital of surplus value, engage, as we have seen, enonnous masses of labor, and this labor, while necessary to the capitalist mode ofproduction, is in itself unproductive, since it does not enlarge the value or surplus value available to society or to the capitalist class by one iota.
The receivables clerk who keeps track of outstanding accounts, the insurance clerk who records payments, the bank clerk who receives deposits-
all of these fonns of commercial and financial labor add nothing to the value of the commodities represented by the figures or papers which they handle.
Yet this lack of effect is not due to the detenninate fonn of their labors-the fact that they are clerical in nature. Clerical labor of similar and sometimes identical kinds is used in production, storage, transportation, and other such processes, all ofwhich do contribute productively to commodity value, accord
ing to the division of productive labor into mental and manual sides. It is due rather to their occupation with tasks which contribute only to the realization ofvalue in the market, or to the struggle of competing capitals over value, and its transfer and redistribution according to individual claims, speculations, and the "services" of capital in the fonn of credit, etc.
Labor may thus be unproductive simply because it takes place outside the capitalist mode of production, or because, while taking place within it, it is used by the capitalist, in his drive for accumulation, for unproductive rather than productive functions. And it is now clear that while unproductive labor has declined outside the grasp ofcapital, it has increased within its ambit. The great mass of labor which was reckoned as unproductive because it did not work for capital has now been transfonned into a mass of labor which is unproductive because it works for capital, and because the needs ofcapital for unproductive labor have increased so remarkably. The more productive capi
talist industry has become--that is to say, the greater the mass of surplus value it extracts from the productive population-the greater has become the mass ofcapital seeking its shares in this surplus. And the greater the mass of capital, the greater the mass of unproductive activities which serve only the diversion of this surplus and its distribution among various capitals.
Modem bourgeois economics has completely lost the power to treat the question ofproductive and unproductive labor, in part because ofthis historical change. Since, in the days of Smith and Ricardo, unproductive labor existed primarily outside the ambit of capital, classical bourgeois economics found it wasteful, and urged its reduction to the minimum. But ever since the mass of unproductive labor has been virtually destroyed outside the corporation and recreated on a different foundation within it, bourgeois economics, which, as a branch of management science, views all things through the eyes ofthe bourgeoi
sie, finds it impossible to retain its old attitude. The modem corporation has